Ansible project

The Ansible project is a build-up of functionalities that come from the original company, AnsibleWorks. It is a community-built automation engine. It is free, open source, and available for anyone to download or install on any Linux OS, using the package manager, source compiling, or Python PyPI. It is very simple, powerful, and agentless.

To use the Ansible automation engine, users do not need any third-party applications or interfaces. They can simply send a command or write a playbook and execute it directly to the engine. This allows the user to access a variety of predefined modules, plugins, and APIs working as building blocks for managing all kinds of IT tasks and network objects. As it is agentless, Ansible relies on SSH to manage the Linux hosts, and WinRM for the Windows hosts. The SSH protocol is also used to control some of the network devices. Some more unsual devices or cloud and virtualization services require the use of Ansible pre-defined APIs to help manage or access them.

Nodes can be defined by their IP addresses or hostname; for the latter, we will have to rely on a DNS server or the local DNS file. APIs are used to communicate with third-party services, such as public or private clouds. Modules, which constitute Ansible's biggest pre-defined function library, allow the users to simplify long and complex tasks into a few lines in a playbook. They cover a large number of tasks, systems, packages, files, datastores, API calls, network device configurations, and so on. Finally, Ansible plugins are used to improve Ansible's core functionality, such as fast host caching, to avoid facts gathering on the network.